Dr. Samuel Alexander

“Anyone who has attempted to actually live simply, of course, will know very well that doing so is not very ‘simple’ at all, in the sense of being easy. This is especially so in the consumerist cultures that have arisen today, which are dominated not only by materialistic values but also by growth-orientated structures that often lock people into high consumption lifestyles. To be sure, it is hard to swim against the current of consumerism. What this suggests is that the significance of simple living is not just about personal lifestyle choice, but has wider and deeper implications on how we think about the structures of our societies. As we will see, this raises political and macroeconomic issues, as well as ethical, cultural, ecological and even spiritual issues. It seems, then somewhat paradoxically, that simple living is actually an extremely complex notion that exhibits a multitude of dimensions and defies simplistic definition.” - Dr. Samuel Alexander

Dr. Alexander is a lecturer at the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Sufficiency Economy: Enough, For Everyone Forever (2015), Prosperous Descent: Crisis as Opportunity in an Age of Limits (2015), and Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation (2013). He is a co-founder of the Simplicity Institute, a non-profit education and research center dedicated to advancing the Simplicity Movement.